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How hellish smoke gave Tennessee a poisoned desert

DUCKTOWN is part of poor America. Home to just 400 people, it is tucked in the south-eastern corner of Tennessee, not far from Chattanooga. Yet a century ago this tiny town made legal history – for the environmental showdown over “Ducktown smoke”. As Duncan Maysilles shows, it was the battle that made US environmental law pretty much from scratch.

In the 1850s, Ducktown saw a copper rush that turned a landscape of lush Appalachian hardwood forests into what became known as the Ducktown desert – perhaps the only desert in the world with more than a metre and a half of …